When the steamer had anchored in the stream about ten miles above the mouth there were seen in the distance at the south bank, under what is known as Weddell's Bluff, several new frame shanties which the ship's officers called the presidio. I went up there in a boat, and found enough of the little shanties to house at least 3000 soldiers, while an old hulk moored at the beach would have accommodated 200 sailors easily enough. There were a dozen sailors with two officers on board the hulk as shipkeepers, while the barracks were in charge of two officers and a score of soldiers, some of whom were keeping house with their families. The building of these barracks in that locality could have but one signification: The Argentine Government expects trouble, sooner or later, with Chili, and this is to be a base for operations against the Strait of Magellan possessions of the Western republic. [Illustration: SANTA CRUZ, PATAGONIA.] The buildings were not all completed, and some of the soldiers were at work as carpenters and painters. This show of business activity only added to my mental picture of the town itself, and it was with considerable pleasure that I returned down stream to land near the ship, and make my first visit there. Climbing to the low table land that borders the stream, I looked back into a wedge-shaped valley between the hills, the Valley of the Missionaries, and saw Santa Cruz--in all nine buildings, of which two were unoccupied, and not a human being in sight anywhere, nor any other evidences of life than a small flock of sheep and a thin red mare grazing idly. The buildings stood on three sides of a surveyed plaza--that is, there was one house on each of two sides, one stood back up the valley a few hundred yards, and the rest were on a third side of the plaza. Among them was the inevitable long low iron structure built for the home and office of the Sub-Prefect. There was also a one-story adobe-walled house that was a combined hotel and general store, having four rooms, while another was a pink wooden building, one story and a quarter high, having five rooms that served the same useful purpose. Among the buildings was an old adobe-walled structure, about ten by twenty feet large, with two places for doors, and the remains of a couple of glazed windows. The earth served as a floor, and the usual iron for a roof. In one corner was a depression that looked like a dry hog wallow, and a porker grunted about outside the building. They said this had been the church that missionaries preached in long ago.